Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique - SCO & Ticciati - Sunday Times

02 April 2012Sunday TimesHugh Canning

Classical CD of the Week: A protégé of Colin Davis, Britain's rising young star conductor, Robin Ticciati, has lost no time in presenting his credentials as an outstanding Berliozian in his first recording as music director of the SCO. This is no carbon copy of perhaps the foremost interpreter of "the best first symphony ever written". Indeed, this Fantastique is remarkable for its fresh insights into one of the great orchestral warhorses, available on disc in a multitude of versions. Only 28 when the recording was made last October, Ticciati is just a year older than Berlioz was when he completed the work, and he makes a strong case for regarding this ever-astonishing, hallucinatory symphony as a young man's music. The opening Rêveries - Passions is especially dreamlike, impressionistic almost, and Ticciati makes much of Berlioz's revolutionary wind, brass and percussion writing in a March to the Scaffold that really makes the listener sit up: after the famous "thwack" of the guillotine blade falling, he pinpoints the pizzicato sound of the head falling into the basket, while the nightmarish sounds of the Witches' Sabbath emerge in the most vivid colours thanks to the clarity of the string sound and the squealing high woodwinds. The veins of lightness he taps in the Waltz, and of melancholy in the Scène aux champs, also find their place in the delightfully airy account of the overture as an encore. Fantastique!